New Research Shows Obamacare Resulted in 25 Additional Democratic Losses in 2010 Elections, but Was It a Long-Term Victory for the Left?

And it seems like that philosophical belief in individualism and limited government sometimes has an impact in the polling booth. According to a recent study, Obamacare was poison for Democrats in 2010.

Voting for President Obama’s healthcare reform law cost Democratic incumbents 5.8 percentage points of support at the polls in 2010, according to a new study in the journal American Politics Research. The study helps explain why Democrats lost 66 House seats, significantly more than the median academic forecast of 44 to 45 seats, study co-author Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College writes on his blog. Democrats in the lead-up to the elections took a number of tough votes — notably on the Wall Street bailout, the stimulus and cap-and-trade — but none was as unpopular as their support for the healthcare reform law. “We show that the roll-call effect on vote share was driven by healthcare reform. Democratic incumbents who voted yes performed significantly worse than those who did not,” Nyhan writes. “We then provide simulation evidence suggesting that Democrats would win approximately 25 more seats if those in competitive districts had voted no, which accounts for the gap between the academic forecasts and the observed outcomes.”

But the 2010 election may have been a Pyrrhic victory – a short-run victory that paves the way for long-run defeat.

I think the left made a clever calculation that losses in the last cycle would be an acceptable price to get more people dependent on the federal government. And once people have to rely on government for something like healthcare, they are more likely to vote for the party that promises to make government bigger.

This is why Obamacare – and the rest of the entitlement state – is so worrisome. If more and more Americans decide to ride in the wagon of government dependency, it will be less and less likely that those people will vote for candidates who want to restrain government.

Europe is a good example. The supposedly “conservative” leaders of major nations such as Spain, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom are a bunch of big-government statists.

That being said, I’m not a complete pessimist. The Medicaid and Medicare reforms in last year’s Ryan budget would largely solve the problem, especially since any Obamacare subsidies presumably could be eliminated as part of such reforms.

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Mr. Mitchell has described America’s decline in a few paragraphs.
Virtually every single European nation has travelled this road. And travelled it more or less independently, before the more recent era of the EU and its uniform mandates. So why would anyone think that Americans will escape that fate? The DNA of the American voter is the same as everyone else’s. It only takes a little bit of time for the vicious cycle to do its work – a little bit more time due to the unprecedented infusion of liberty endowed on this country at its creation – an unprecedented and unrepeatable historical coincidence where a few developed settlers discover a new continent and happened to seed it with the aberrant individual freedom ideas held by a small minority in late 18th century England. But that endowment and historical fortune is now all but used up, the margin of advantage that Americans hold over other nations is now very thin, and three billion emerging world competitors have little time or desire to wait and find out how America’s experiment with statism/socialism will turn out. Americans will lose their top prosperity, especially since most — even opponents of ObamaCare and other “care” packages to come — have no clue what is happening and what the fundamental forces of decline are.

Historical momentum can only carry you so far dear Americans. Rational understanding as to what had set you apart from the rest of the world is necessary to maintain it. And that rational thought does not exist — even amongst opponents of America’s Europeanization. Vague references to traditions and star spangled banners are simply grossly insufficient in preventing you from converging towards the worldwide average. You are now set on a below world average growth trendline: i.e. DECLINE.

[…] in Colorado for the Second Amendment Daniel J. Mitchell | Sep 12, 2013 Back in 2012, I reported on some academic research showing that Democrats lost about 25 seats in the 2010 mid-term elections because of support for […]

[…] the way Obamacare is imploding in the short run, but they nonetheless may think that it will be worth it in the medium run because more people will be dependent on government (though they may regret their choice in the […]